When you build a program, the compiler turns each source file into an object file. Then a linker stitches all the object files and libraries into one executable. On Linux, the default linker is usually GNU ld (also called bfd). The GNU binutils also ship gold, an alternative linker that was designed to be faster. Gold was built a Google and first made available in 2008. The mold linker is a newer linker written by Rui Ueyama, it was first released in 2021. It is meant as a drop-in replacem...

New in the SumatraPDF pre-release builds : Menu bar with tabs setting The new ShowMenubarWithTabs advanced setting controls whether the menu bar is shown when tabs are on. CmdToggleMenuBar updates it. Edit screenshots before saving Take Screenshot opens the captured image in the image save/crop/resize window, where you can crop, resize and pick a format before saving. Overlay scrollbar arrows and theme look The overlay scrollba...

Throughout the summer of 2026, there were plenty of signs of what was to come. Every week, it seemed, artificial intelligence models were offering proofs of decades-old mathematical conjectures. So what happened on September 8 shouldn’t have been a complete surprise. And yet to many it felt sudden, almost violent. OpenAI announced that its models had solved one of math’s most famous problems — and… Source Throughout the summer of 2026, there were plenty of signs of what was to come. E...

Map of golden mussel observations through time. Data sources: CDFW and iNaturalist Since its initial appearance in California in October 2024, the golden mussel, Limnoperna fortunei , has accomplished Big Things. These little mussels, native to the Pearl River Delta in China, have taken off from their initial foothold in Stockton to spread all the way south to San Diego, and have been spreading northward as well in recent months. It has been an extreme couple years for CA invasion scie...

Benchmark In Milliseconds Oct 5, 2026 How long should a micro benchmark run? My rule of thumb is to tweak the input size until the benchmark takes about 300ms, for the following reasons: Milliseconds are integers ranging from 1 to 999. Enough precision to notice even a small improvement, and easy to scan visually. No need for different units or floating points (compare 1.31s with 239ms ). Anything faster than, say, 10ms risks being skewed by fixed costs (e.g, interpreter st...

My blog began as a blosxom (Perl) site running on a VPS. In 2011 I moved to the new GitHub Pages , with the site generated statically by Jekyll (Ruby) on a GitHub server. It was a no-brainer: easier, faster, and cheaper, better in every way. After 15 years of Jekyll, and spurred by a post on m4 , this week I replaced it with a new, custom-built static site generator , dubbed ssg , in “C with templates” C++20. The ~8KLoC source closely follows my personal coding style including tem...

This is a long-form written guide for the fight AAC Heavyweight M1 (Savage) in the game Final Fantasy 14, where the challenger and their seven friends fight the Elezen succubus Vamp Fatale. You may call this the XeBin guide in party finder listings. If you want to experience this fight, don't read this guide. This guide is based off of the Toxic Friends raidplan, the Hector Lectures strategies used by North America Party Finder raiding culture, and insights I have gained from running t...

For the past decade, every time I went up to the mountains here in my area, I got the chance to look at one particular mountain ridge standing there silently in the background. It spans roughly 30km, east to west. On one side, the Slovenian one, there’s the town of Kobarid. On the other, just more mountains. I’ve considered walking this ridge for years, every time making a different plan for how to tackle it. Some people do it in multiple days, sleeping either outside or in one of the va...

I now have a /photo slash page, inspired by Robert Birming . This month we have the suburb marker for Asquith in northern Sydney: This is not to be confused with WHAM’s Edge of Heaven , though the spring weather was quite lovely. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-10-06. I now have a /photo slash page, inspired by Robert Birming . This month we have the suburb marker for Asquith in northern Sydney: This is not to be confused with WHAM’s Edge of Heaven , though the spring we...

More than a year ago I wrote a few posts here that recommended people not to load custom tools into their context (or MCP servers) but to just use more scripts. Most importantly I wrote that Code Is All You Need and I wrote about that MCP needs code . With Pi 1.0 we now added MCP support via Codemode which in some ways is a long time coming, but then also maybe somewhat surprising to some. So I want to share some updated thoughts on this blog on what this all means. What Are Tools Wh...

Snap Inc. counted 4,723 full-time employees on June 30, 2026, down from 5,381 three months earlier. Between those dates, an April 15 restructuring affected about 1,000 team members. These Snapchat employee statistics cover quarterly headcount, layoff costs, median pay, team mix and hiring, drawn from Snap’s SEC filings, its newsroom and Revelio Labs workforce estimates. Snapchat Employee Statistics 4,723 Full-time employees at Snap on June 30, 2026, down 9% year over year. 16% Share...

The Chandrayaan 3 lander Vikram on the Moon, imaged by the mission’s rover Pragyan on August 30, 2023. Image: ISRO On August 23, 2023 at 12:33 UTC, India’s robotic Chandrayaan 3 robotic lander completed the 19 minutes of its nerve-wracking autonomous descent to the Moon. In one piece and upright, it now lay near the lunar south pole at the coordinates 69.37°S, 32.32°E . The triumphant touchdown made India only the fourth nation to achieve the feat of a soft lunar landing, following the...

A few months ago I set out to learn how program verification works. I tried Lean and Dafny , but kept wondering how verification actually worked. To find out, DeepSeek and I built Frml , which is a very simple imperative language with its own verifier. This post walks through the Frml verification engine, explaining how a Frml program becomes Boolean logic that the Z3 solver can check, and what Z3 does with that logic. The language and its verifier are layered: the scalar level handles...

When working with floats, we tend to reuse the more familiar integer arithmetic patterns. More specifically, we always try to prevent a disaster rather than reacting to it. I keep noticing this pattern over and over again, and seeing that LLMs still get it wrong most of the time means that, either I am wrong, or everyone else is; it's obviously the latter, and I'm going to explain why. Integer arithmetic safety I wrote before about the issue with checking the result of integer arithmetic a...

Here's a product feature which the world is going to need a whole lot more of over the coming months and years: default hard budget caps . I'm talking about the feature of pay-by-usage services and APIs that lets you say "after $X/month, cut this thing off and return errors". These need to be hard limits. Soft caps, "after $X/month, send me a warning email", will not cut it. Coding agents, and personal agents (coding agents wrapped in a less threatening UI), greatly reduce the friction of s...

The idea of “superpersuasion” has been floating around the AI safety community for decades. Now that powerful and difficult-to-control LLMs have appeared, people are again talking about the idea that a sufficiently intelligent AI might be able to persuade people to do whatever it wants. The classic 1 version of this idea is an AI persuading some engineer to “let it out of the box”: to grant it access to the internet. The modern version of this idea is t...

PERTH (LAND FORCES) / MELBOURNE / CANBERRA, Australia (October 6th, 2026) – Shield AI and Innovaero Technologies Ltd (ASX:INN), an Australian defence and aerospace technology and manufacturing company specialising in precision loitering munition systems, have announced a collaboration to give the Australian Defence Force (ADF) greater strike capability. Under a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), Shield AI will integrate its Hivemind mission autonomy software on Innovaero’s One-Way Loiteri...

What's up on the smolweb? September 2026 roundup 2026-10-05 17:00 Autumn is here, the AI slop tide keeps rising on the big web, and the smolweb responds by growing quietly but noticeably. Here is a roundup of what happened on the small web, the smolnet, and around the Gemini protocol in September 2026. Geminispace approaching 3,600 active capsules The Lupa crawler (Stephane Bortzmeyer's Geminispace survey) currently lists 5,215 known capsules , with 3,567 recently connected (page upda...

In response to my last fragments (probably the bit about us worrying if LLMs have consciousness when we when we should be wondering why they don’t have a conscience) “Metalanguage” replied : we shipped the id and forgot the superego. classic software lifecycle. I don’t know what was on their mind, but their post immediately made me think of the classic 1956 movie Forbidden Planet. Plenty of sci-fi, and other literature, have explored humans creating technology with uninten...

I want to give all my breath to the song, listening to every transcendent, liminal, spooky note, accompanied by intertwined tracks of coded and pure voice. I want to sing out the words I know loudly, and read all those I don’t know so that I may sing as much as I can with all the ardour in my heart and my soul, each vestige of passion entering the air being a sign of life, a sign of feeling, a sign of all that I have learned and all that I do not know. I listen to songs that I have heard dozen...

(This was written about 9 months ago.  Its not out of date... yet) People think that AI is going to DESTROY some jobs and CREATE some jobs. It may be too early to tell if this is true. Even so, here are some thoughts.  1) Who will win? Who will lose? 2) Historically in the long term society was better off after a tech change (e.g., we live longer now than we did in the farm-era). Will that happen here as well? 3) We have some sense of what kinds of jobs will be destroyed. But what kind will be...

Annunciation with Saint Emidius, by Carlo Crivelli, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at a Senate permitting reform bill, the potential of Tesla’s Cybercab, the Navy’s $200 billion worth of shipyard renovations, a possible plan to return a SR-71 to service, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housing...

The original idea was to kick off this article with a short list of complaints people have about async Rust. Y’know, the type you often see in the wild, justified or otherwise. I then realized that it’d easily be possible to find enough material riffing on async Rust to cover a whole bingo card, and that this would make for a much funnier format. The next time you see people arguing about async Rust, see if you can get a bingo! A 5×5 bingo card of common async Rust complaints....